


it's all fire and brimstone, baby

by kiiouex, telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Kavinsky Apologism, Lots of Discussion of Character Death, POV Second Person, Ronan's Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 00:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10842708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex, https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: Long assembly this Friday, ends late. Hockey tournaments at lunch today in the new gymnasium, spectators welcome. Joseph Kavinsky and Ilya Prokopenko are no longer with us.





	it's all fire and brimstone, baby

**Author's Note:**

> here's a bunch of thoughts about the gang heading back to Aglionby after K's death because it felt like such a glaring omission from Blue Lily? ah well 
> 
> tk wrote this and kii wrote over it

You slow as you pass his locker, something you never did before. It still has that faint greyish-red smear on it from the time Proko spray-painted ‘C*UNT’ down its length and did a really half-assed job of rubbing it off in detention, with cleaner strong enough to strip the colour off the metal. It sits third from the left in a block of twenty other lockers, largely unremarkable, it’s only claim to fame that it belonged to Joseph Kavinsky, the only Aglionby student lost to suicide in living memory.

You wonder if administration’s already cleared it out, re-assigned it, set some poor freshman up for a very weird time. You wonder if he left anything in there. Probably a tatty maths or economics textbook from his sophomore year, when he still had one or two fucks to give. Some Twizzlers, maybe. A single stray pill, the chemistry and production of which would have local scientists scratching their heads for months. It’s probably all gone rank over the summer. You consider looking anyway.

Gansey calls your name from down the hall. Adam’s by his side, the two of them staring like they think they’re interrupting a moment, equal parts sceptical and intrigued that you might be looking at Kavinsky’s things with any kind of mourning.

Guilt and irritation wash over you in equal measure at getting caught. You catch up to them quickly, and you don’t let yourself look back.

 

At assembly, a few rows back, Cheng sits solemn and quiet in a pair of white sunglasses. The sight of it makes your throat stick uncomfortably, fear that those might be _the_ glasses from the strip even though you can’t imagine how they would have fallen into Cheng’s hands. You suffer a worthless surge of adrenaline until the crush of oblivion sucks it away, a mess of hair-trigger nerves and paradoxes.

A teacher stops at the sight of Cheng, says something short, hand outstretched. You can take a guess at what the vulture says: ‘Please take those off. It’s not a part of school uniform. It’s not the time nor the place. Grieve on your own time.’

Cheng says “No”. He turns his head but he’s too slow; the teacher grabs the glasses, folds and pockets them. Informs Cheng that he can collect them at the end of the day. Walks off.

Cheng’s chest swells, then deflates with a tiny puff of defeat. He notices your body swivelled toward him and meets your stare with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, shallow and inadequate. Your gaze is boring questions into him, everything you don’t want to ask aloud, who was Joseph Kavinsky to him? Where did he get those glasses? Why is Cheng of all people the one person in this sea of tired, bored faces to notice that two students are missing?

A teacher clears his throat; points you in the direction you ought to be facing. Back straight, chin up, eyes forward. Fists clenched. You feel Cheng’s eyes on the back of your head for the interminable assembly, and ignore the itch to turn again. 

 

At lunch you lean your cheek into one fist, poke at your meatloaf with disinterest, let your friends talk around you like you’re not there. Your mp3 player died hours ago, but you keep your headphones on, enjoying the world more when it’s filtered down.

“It’s just bizarre,” Gansey murmurs, sipping at his orange juice. He sets it down so carefully, like the faintest ripple will offset the taste. “Everyone knows it happened. They’re all talking about it, but not a single announcement from any of the teachers. What are they waiting for? Are they going to send a letter home?”

Adam shakes his head, looks out at other tables. “Maybe they did. Maybe we missed it - it happened well over a month ago. Or maybe since it happened outside of term time, they don’t think they have to say anything.”

“I mean.” Gansey shifts in his seat. “It’s not as if I was expecting a _ceremony_ , but an acknowledgement at the very least.”

You feel Adam’s eyes heavy on you but you don’t look up from your plate. “They don’t hold memorials for suicides, Gansey,” Adam says, clinical as ever, tone a little cushioned as he guesses you’re listening. “They don’t want anyone to think it’s an option. In case it inspires students who are already at-risk.”

You can _feel_ Gansey struggling not to look at you after that. “So what’s the solution? Pretend he never existed? Prokopenko, too?”

“That’s Aglionby for you.”

You throw down your fork; it clatters, causes Gansey to jump. Adam doesn’t flinch. Quickly, you decide to fault the meatloaf for your reaction; the longer you look at it, the sicker you feel, and you shove it away.

“No?” Gansey mouths more than asks, and you shake your head once. He spins the tray over to Adam who takes the plate for seconds. At least Parrish is content to let you have feelings; Gansey runs his fingers over the rim of his glass and watches you worriedly all the while. 

You hear a voice behind you just as Adam and Gansey look up over your head. You pull your headphones down around your neck and turn in your chair to see Cheng. He seems paler than you remember, like he didn’t get enough sun over summer, and he’s run down without it. “King, court,” he greets, but it just sounds sad without his usual pep, his insufferable here-take-this-flyer grin. “Just… wanted to say hey.”

“Hey,” Gansey obligingly echoes.

“So, uh. I heard you guys were there. When it happened.” All eyes seem to naturally turn to you, and you have to wonder if it’s some kind of unconscious reaction on your part that draws everyone’s attention. If you grind your teeth a little too loud, if you clench your fists a little too hard, if the set of your jaw is just inviting the challenge to keep yourself steady.

“Yes,” Gansey says, and it’s matter-of-fact in a way that makes you wish he would shut up. Tact and discretion are only afforded to those who deserve it, apparently. “At his races, his fourth of July party. He drew quite the unsuspecting crowd.”

You feel like you’ve just watched Cheng turn a shade paler. “Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I heard there were a lots of people there, lots of witnesses. His pyrotechnics were insane, even before they were… yeah.”

You try to communicate to Cheng that you’re not above punching him in the throat if he doesn’t stop talking, but he’s looking at Gansey more than you, doesn’t see your curling fingers. It’s not like you don’t already know what he’s here to ask.

Cheng’s gaze flickers between the three of you, but he’s brave enough to get what he came for. “Help me dispel a rumour: was it really an accident?”

“Proko’s was,” Adam says, a nebulous half-truth; what else do you call someone driving at a ditch at eighty miles an hour, comatose at the wheel? “Kavinsky knew what he was doing.”

Masochistically, you watch Cheng’s reaction, but he doesn’t seem surprised. “Ah. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Gansey mutters.

You say to Cheng, tone accusing, “I’ve never seen you two talk.”

“We go back. He used to, uh… well, we go back. Family friend.” He grimaces. “Sort of.”

“You went to his funeral?”

“Did he have a funeral?”

You don’t actually know, and the realisation unnerves you more than you’d like to admit. What happened to his remains, singed flesh, charred bones? Did they burn him the rest of the way to ash, or chuck what was left into a box? Was there no funeral because there was no one to arrange one? Wasn’t his mother there to weep over her son’s body? Does she even know her son is dead?

You can’t speak. You can’t breathe.

Cheng claps you on the shoulder, fumbles a goodbye to Gansey, walks away and leaves a sickly silence behind him. Your hands shake as you slide your headphones back over your ears, shut yourself off, reduce the rest of the world to muted, distant echoes. Someone taps your arm, someone dings your chair, but you don’t react. You feel like your lungs are heaving, gut clenched, tremors wracking you up and down, but you win the fight to keep your shoulders from shaking.

 

That night, you sit up with Noah. You don’t remember consciously making plans to sit up with Noah; he just entered your thoughts and then he was there, translucent in the dusk, perched on the window ledge. There’s no point in hiding your thoughts from him, so you just ask, “Didn’t you get a memorial?”

He shrugs, swings his legs. “Not really. Lot of search party announcements, though, updates from the police and all that. They never held a service for me; they just wound down the search.”

“Shit, man,” you tell him unhelpfully. At least Kavinsky didn’t just _disappear_. He went as public as possible. Unforgettable. 

“They do Raven Day now though,” Noah tells you, perking up.

Your mouth curls into a smile. “It’s a bullshit tradition, Czerny. Only reason they celebrate it is because everyone was so messed up over your disappearance.”

He laughs, “Hey, fuck you man. Raven Day is great!”

“You’re deluded,” you tell him, and you don’t ask if Kavinsky might be a ghost because you can’t imagine a single worse thing.

 

The next day, there’s graffiti on his locker. A rough scrawl in the bottom right corner: ‘rest in pieces fuckweasel’.

The bell for next period screams but you continue to stare at it as the tide of boys thins around you. You don’t know how to read the tone; whether it’s a good-humoured send off or someone taking a shit on a guy who, in all fairness, was notorious for reckless endangerment of his peers. Maybe you could tell if you knew who’d written it.

 

You’re distracted and dozy in history class when you start to notice how murmured cusses have turned into hissed obscenities, and you turn just in time to see the first set of knuckles crack across someone’s jaw. Chairs fly backward, hands reach for throats and arms cover faces, and you watch on with a rush of blood and adrenaline to your heart as Skov pounds a guy twice his size into the hardwood floors with the kind of reckless abandon that only comes from drugs, grief, and another layer of drugs.

You hadn’t even realised how much you missed it, need it, the first rush of blood since Kavinsky left. Your knees bounce excitedly as nearby lacrosse-uniformed boys stand around with all the menace of cage fighters, looking for the right collar to grab, the right place to intervene. Swan and Jiang mirror them with all the injustice of the world set in their shoulders, looking like they don’t have even so much as a pretty face to lose. You’re half-ready to weigh in on their side, not that they’d want you.

Feet stay loose, more-stupid-than-cutting one-liners are exchanged, thumbs tuck smartly outside of fists, and for a heart-stopping moment it looks as if a scrap of four on three is about to break out—

\- Until the teacher runs at them, all waving arms and frantic shouts, dragging Skov off the boy whose nose is now crooked and bubbling with blood. He turns onto his stomach and spits out what you really hope and don’t hope is a tooth. The teacher forcefully escorts Skov out of the classroom pausing only to bark Swan and Jiang’s names. They fall out with the kind of arrogant gait that states they did nothing wrong. Honour defended, heads high, they don’t even glance at you on their way out of the room.

The door closes and the rest of the classroom erupts into chaos.

“Well,” Gansey sighs. He sounds short of breath, like he hasn’t actually heard the sound of a nose breaking before today but won’t be able to forget it now. “That certainly could’ve been a lot worse.”

“Shame,” you say, and he levels a look at you.

 

You still have photos of him on your phone. About thirteen all up.

The very first photo you have of him is dated almost two years ago, when you snapped him in some public gents with a cracked basin and broken soap dispenser. It steals your breath just how _different_ he looked back then; like a smug fifteen year-old, hand pulling a rude gesture, expression crooked but not twisted enough to be unattractive, dark eyes not yet abused enough to keep hidden behind those shades. He looks clean and young and devilishly innocent in a way you haven’t seen in a very long time.

The photos you’ve got from last June show a corpse in the summer by comparison, rot festering under his skin long before he started to die.

Most of the pics are blurry shots he took of the two of you while you were passed out in his basement, when he was trying to come up with outrageous poses to send to Gansey. Most of them are stupid. If he were still alive you’d have no hesitation deleting them. But as it is, you feel like deleting even a blurry photo of his hand on your scalp is an omen. Every photo is cursed. Delete his face and you’ll never fucking see it again.

It hits you like a blow to the throat, that stumbling realisation that you’ll never see him again. Fuck. _Fuck._

You hate feeling this way. Raw, empty, overwrought. You hate that a boy who almost killed your brother could make you feel even a fraction of how you felt the day you buried your father.

“He’s not very photogenic,” Noah murmurs out of nowhere and you bark out a laugh you think you really needed. You elbow him, wipe away the something-in-your-eye, shove your phone back into your dresser. No one texts you anymore.

 

The homeroom teacher stands in front of twenty tired students as they load up on the day’s textbooks and reads off a list of morning announcements. Long assembly this Friday, ends late. Hockey tournaments at lunch today in the new gymnasium, spectators welcome. Last day permission slips will be accepted for biology field trip, no exceptions. Joseph Kavinsky and Ilya Prokopenko are no longer with us.

Your heart pounds, and you can feel Gansey’s eyes on you. The teacher sinks back into her desk chair for roll call, and whispers erupt around the classroom. More people look at you, and you look at your leather bands, and try not to think. The conspicuous space on the roll where Kavinsky and Proko’s names should be is now closed, two thin strikethroughs and no more pausing as the teacher debates whether or not to call them out.

And that’s it. That’s all you get. A vague, one-sentence, throwaway announcement on a Wednesday morning when everyone is still too drowsy to hear it.

That’s all he gets.

 

News gets around fast. Even though there must have been other Aglionby students there on the fourth, it takes the official declaration to really rub it in for the rest of the student body. They respond with a campaign of blatantly untrue accounts. You can’t move through the halls without hearing rumours, myths, legends. The eulogy he never had.

“Kavinsky started a fire in the chem lab to get out of an exam.”

“He’s the one that knocked the head off that statue in town. “

“Kavinsky shot a dealer from the next town over for getting on his turf.”

“He was going to take over his dad’s gang back in Jersey.”

“What he did to Prokopenko –”  

“Kavinsky’s finally gone back where he came from.” 

 

Skov isn’t in any of his classes. You overhear rumours you pretend not to listen to that the boy he wailed on – Percival? What an Aglionby name – was put in hospital for a broken nose, dental trauma, compound fracture, etcetera etcetera. It’s a pretty impressive array of injuries for such a quick and dirty fight. You hear Skov broke a toe. You hear he’s been suspended, maybe even expelled. You hear Percival’s father is going to take legal action, and you imagine Skov’s going to give exactly zero fucks about that.

Later, you start hearing that Skov had brass knuckles on, had a bat, that Swan held him down, that Kavinsky’s name had started the fight. It doesn’t take long before the truth is unrecognisable in the story that goes around.

In the afternoon, you and everyone else in study hall witness the school counsellor and another smiley, smartly-dressed professional you’ve never seen before poke their heads in to ask for Swan and Jiang. All eyes find them, single them out. Jiang rolls his eyes in a way that makes you wonder if they’ve been hounded before, and you notice bruises, gashes and gauze up both their arms as they gather their things. You want to know if they’ve been in more fights since yesterday. You want to know if they’ve heard what people are saying about K.

You watch on, the rest of the class sniggering as the two of them pick up their books, shoulder their bags, and walk out. They don’t come back.

They’re not at school the next day and it feels as if the entire gang has been forcefully uprooted, the weeds of Aglionby tossed away. None of Kavinsky’s dogs are left to defend him, and you’re unpleasantly surprised to find you feel alone.

 

The graffiti has increased twofold.

His locker has been decked out with obscene gestures, vile insults, more than a few unabashed references to dicks and the devil, and the real surprise is that none of it was you. A reversed tribute; a public condemnation. Half the shit on there should go on a police report not a locker if it’s true, which very little is. 

You read claims that you _know_ are grossly exaggerated, about prototype pills putting people in hospital, about the time Kavinsky burned Proko’s eyebrows off with a lighter and a can of aerosol back in freshman year, about every different story behind every different suspension. Between the stories, people have drawn anthropomorphised veiny dicks with snapbacks and blunts, captioned ‘smoke weed ‘erryday’. Racial slurs and caricatures. Fuckboy, faggot, degenerate, coward. ‘Burn in hell’.

The fact that it’s one o’clock and this display has been here for hours stills your heart. Students with armfuls of books and boatloads of friends blow by like it’s the most natural display in the world. People only ever stop to laugh, and you don’t know if that’s much better than people not stopping at all.

“You’re putting up with this shit?” you snap at the first teacher to walk by, and it’s only after you point at the locker that she finally sees.

“Oh—Oh God.” She drifts closer, staring with a grotesque fascination. She reads a couple of tributes only to make a face like she wish she hadn’t. “Is this your locker, Lynch?”

You wonder if anyone even knew Kavinsky was human. “Kavinsky’s,” you say, the name slow and acidic.

She takes a long look at you, and you stare her down, shoulders back, snarl in your throat buried as you try to keep your gaze cool. You tell yourself that you do not give a fuck, this is just too ridiculous to ignore.

“Right. Well, um… We’ll get someone to clean this mess up.” She starts to walk away, waving her arm with dismissal. “Just leave it alone; if you see anyone else vandalising it, tell them to knock it off,” and then she disappears into the teacher’s lounge.

No one ever gave a shit about Kavinsky at all. You remind yourself that you don’t either.

 

That night, you retreat to your room early, leaving Gansey to wander around Monmouth and worry over you. He drifts to your door every hour or so to ask if you want to do something, if you need anything, if you want to talk. You tell him to leave you alone, that no you do not want to fucking talk, and you drink from a bottle you’ve been saving for something like this.

You feel fucked up, on a different plane of existence to every other lousy human on earth. You drink, and it scalds in your throat, burns in your belly, and you wipe your mouth on one sleeve, your eyes on the other, and Noah sits beside you and tells you that it’s not your fault. You _know_ it’s not your fault. He was a goddamned wreck and not your responsibility. But.

What had you said to him? How had he looked, after, like you’d dropped a fucking bomb on him? He’d been so hurt, and it had been a _riot_ at the time, Joseph Fucking Kavinsky having feelings. But.

You think about driving to school, breaking in, going to those lockers, pouring one out for K and Proko, wiping off all the nasty shit. Maybe it’s the least you could do. Maybe it’s still not your problem. Maybe if you keep not reacting, people will stop _looking_ at you, and then it’ll all get so much easier.

You want to race, but you know he’s not out there, and you don’t want to go and see the new up-and-coming punk shit scrambling to take his place.

You reach for your keys anyway. Noah says, “Are you kidding me?” but it doesn’t matter. Your vision tilts, your stomach urges bile straight up your throat, and you only make it as far as the bathroom.

 

You don’t want to go to school. You have a hangover like you got run down by a freight train and Gansey is trying to push breakfast into your mouth, asking if you’ve done your homework, slept more than three hours, picked up Declan’s calls. It’s easier to fall into his car than to fight him.

You’ve only got one foot in Aglionby when the harsh stink of burnt plastic and melted metal sears your nose from all the way down the corridor. In the distance, yellow tape cordons off Kavinsky’s locker, and all those neighbouring. The door’s wide, and scorched black to the core. A janitor’s trolley sits a few feet away, unmanned. Whatever was in Kavinsky’s locker is just ash and grit now.

It comes as no surprise his spontaneous memorial would end like this. Gansey looks like he very badly wants to say something to you, and doesn’t, which is about all you’ve got to be grateful for.

 

Gansey has to really search to find where they buried Kavinsky. An offhand word from you, a much-wanted opportunity for him to try and ease whatever it is you’re telling him you’re not feeling. The burial was done by the government, paid out of Kavinsky’s pocket. You hope his coffin was gold-plated. You hope it had a flaming skull or a knife or something else stupidly tacky down the side. It’s what he would’ve wanted. Apparently his body was held in storage for about a month until his far-off Bulgarian mobster relatives replied something akin to ‘just bury the fucker’.

It’s a different graveyard to where your father is buried. Your father had wealth, prestige, a name; Kavinsky is just another in a long line of nobodies. It’s deathly cold, like Noah’s pressed right up against you, something you choose to find comforting for now. 

“You sure this is it? Number sixty eight?” Gansey asks and Adam goes back to the isle, counts again. He nods once. Number sixty eight is a dirt plot, fresh earth, unremarkable. You glare at it dully.

“He’s the only one without some kind of marker,” Henry observes, and while you’ve already noticed, you still wish he hadn’t said it out loud. “Damn. _Damn._ I should’ve brought some flowers.”

“No fuckin’ way,” you mutter.

Gansey says, “It’s customary but, he wouldn’t have appreciated that. How about cigarettes and beer?”

“Cocaine.”

You can feel the atmosphere start to lift. “Pyrotechnics.”

“Proko.”

The mood drops again.

“Proko got a proper burial,” Cheng says. “His family handled it.” Last time you drove past Kavinsky’s mansion, it was shut up with a big, white-teethed estate agent’s sign stuck out front. No sign of his mother. It stings less every time you think about it.

You think coming here was a mistake. You saw him burn; you don’t exactly need _closure_. You don’t know what you need. You hate him; you fucking loathe him down to his cracked, charred bones, and you want to not miss him out of spite, you don’t want to notice the spaces where he used to be, you don’t want to notice the way that absolutely no one else gives a _fuck_. Adam and Blue don’t want to be at his grave. Cheng and Gansey have never said a good word about him. You haven’t either. You’re not going to. _Fuck_ him for dying.

“No one wants to say anything?” Gansey offers, but of course no one does. More eyes on you, the generous pause left for you to grieve, but you don’t. You won’t. Your teeth will grind themselves to grit, and you look away from lot sixty eight, and Gansey checks his watch to see if you need to stay any longer out of courtesy.

“See ya, cokeman,” Cheng says.

You walk away from the grave, ignore all the goddamned eyes on you, and you do not look back.

 

Aglionby puts in new lockers, and tactfully doesn’t assign one of them. A new wave of street racers rise up, young and dumb and ready to test the reaction time of Henrietta’s law enforcement. Slowly, attention eases away from you, and slowly, Gansey stops asking how you’re doing, and you can finally start breathing again.

You don’t think about him.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!! You can find us on tumblr [here](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) and [here](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com)


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